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How to Track your daily Activity with just an iPhone

Yeah, you don’t need anApple Watch or a dedicated fitness gear like the Fitbit to track your daily activity. You can do it with just your iPhone. I’ll tell you how to do it in this article.

Before we go into that, you should know the need to track it.

Why Track Daily Activity?

If you’re someone who workout every day, you’d want to know how much activity you’re doing a given day, don;t you? It not just motivates you to keep doing the workout the very next day, it also challenges you to improve your miles. You can review your last week or month’s achievement with ease. And for all this, there’s no need to keep a book and write down every stat. What if your smartphone can keep the record for you with just a few swipes?

Even if you’re a lazy chap who doesn’t get enough time to workout on a regular basis, tracking your daily activity can still be helpful. How? I’ll tell you a few examples. You climb stairs to your office or home, run to catch the bus and walk to your car at the parking area. Everything counts. If there’s an app that tells you how much steps you’ve taken during the whole day even without you noticing it, wouldn’t that be cool?

Tracking your activity can make sure that you are never going the “sedentary-life” road.

How to Track your Activity with an iPhone?

Most of us are unaware of the hidden powers of our iPhone. The newer iPhones comes built-in with a motion detection co-processor. That chip along with the other sensors like the barometer, accelerometer, GPS makes tracking all kinds of our routine activity possible. It can also be done with the help of a dedicated fitness tracker like Fitbit, but in this article, we’ll see how to make our iOS devices our fitness coach.

As mentioned earlier, only the newer generation iPhones come equipped with the motion detection chip.

All you need is an iPhone 5S or newer model running iOS 8 or above versions. Follow the below steps to track your daily activity:

Open the “Health” app neatly placed in the first page of your home screen.

Go to the “Health Data” tab which is the first tab on the bottom left of the screen.

Go to the “Activity” card and that’s it.

You can find a wide range of activities that can be tracked by your iPhone. My favourite ones are:

Walking + Running, Steps, Flights, Cycling and Workouts

You just need to carry the iPhone in your pocket, hand, or even a pack and the rest is just magic.

To get a quick look at the activity of your day, simply go to the second tab at the bottom of the screen labelled as “Today”.

Things to know about the Health App

The Health app could well be the most ignored or un-noticed app in your iPhone till date. But, Apple has really put much hardwork into it. From it’s first version back in iOS 8 to the current version, there has been considerable improvement in the usefulness of the app. Some useful things that I liked most about the Apple’s Health app are:

No need for a dedicated fitness and activity tracker

The app works all the time tracking the steps and other vital data using incredibly powerful sensors.

It doesn’t take even a minor hit on the battery life of the iPhone.

We can choose the unit in which the metric has to be displayed.

Our favourite activities can be pinned to the dashboard of the app for easy reference.

Even if you have other fitness apps installed, the Health app gathers data from all such apps and acts as a central hub of health info. We can manage the apps that needs to sync with the Health app very easily.

Sleep-Wake cycles, mindfulness, emergency ID, vital signs, lab results, body measurements, energy burnt, active energy and minutes of exercise done are some other useful features of the Health app. Another article on the full functionality of this app will be published shortly.

Dr Prasoon, founder of BeingTheDoctor is a qualified medical practitioner who finds time to write articles on "health" and his "clinical experiences". He is currently engaged in providing primary health care services in rural India. Learn more in the "about" page.

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